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RB: Do you have any instances of racism that you recall either from growing up in the region, here in Philadelphia, or in college? Because you described both of these spaces fairly white, fairly non-Asian spaces. Is there any sort of direct instances of racism that you or your family experienced at this time?

PU: You're talking about after I came out of school?

RB: Either during or after?

PU: I mean, I know that my parents had definite issues with that. You know, my father got fired after Pearl Harbor just based on race, and along with all the other Nisei that were at the power company. I think what happened with a lot of Nisei when they were coming out, including people like my parents who had college degrees, were not getting jobs that matched their educational background, and they were getting unskilled labor jobs like my dad did when he first came here. And my mom, her first couple jobs, she was basically a typist or a receptionist kind of thing, and then she just started kind of moving up when she started doing this resettlement work and they realized that she was very good at working with people and solving problems and so on. But I think it's kind of significant that they chose to come to Philadelphia instead of going back. I've often thought that that kind of had an impact on my generation in terms of how we were raised, that we were kind of put into this isolated setting, which was bad in a lot of ways, but it was also good in a sense that people went back to California, and many of them encountered this open hostility or worse, treatment that they got from people that still regarded everybody as being enemy people. So the fact that my father spent most of his career as a draftsman rather than as an engineer was also, I think, a reflection of that.

So I think in terms of myself, I kind of feel like there might have been some occasional things that I pretty much try not to remember, of being verbally mistreated by people from time to time. But I kind of think that there were other instances where there were things that happened that I didn't, I was unaware of, but they had an impact on me. And I just remember, even when I was in high school, that my mom made some comment to me about the girls that I was dating, and whether their families would not like the fact that their daughters were dating me because of race. Which was not a vibe that I picked up from anybody, but how would you know if somebody was not interested in being your girlfriend or something? I mean, there's obviously lots of reasons for that, which you may not be aware of. And same thing, like with social activities and stuff, like was it just because I was more of an academic kind of student as opposed to a social kind of person? Or is it something else that there were lots of kids, whether it be the kinds of social circles, go to parties and things like that, hang out with other kids, which I didn't do. Was that me or was that them? I don't know. So I think there were probably things like that throughout my life where, about opportunities that were missed or people that you could not benefit from because they would not be interested in you based on race.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.